NASA reveals hovering prototype planetary lander Morpheus (VIDEO)

NASA’s latest test vehicle may not survive in its current form going forward, but its ability to hover like a helicopter and land on tough terrain could prove integral to future missions to Mars and other interplanetary locations.

Dubbed “Morpheus,” the new rocket prototype was successfully
tested last week at the Kennedy Space Center’s Shuttle Landing
Facility in Florida. While vehicle’s design looks strikingly like
an alien aircraft or something you’d expect to see out of a
science fiction movie, it’s Morpheus’ capabilities that have
scientists and engineers most excited.

As you can see in the video posted by the Morpheus team, the
vehicle launches vertically into the air, flies around the
landscape and can hover in place like a helicopter. Importantly,
it can also control its descent back down to Earth and land
upright. Considering rockets have generally been designed to be
expendable – they either burn up in the atmosphere or crash into
the ocean upon re-entry into Earth – developing vehicles that can
survive more than one voyage would significantly help control the
costs of space exploration.

According to the Atlantic, Morpheus probably won’t become an
operational vehicle in its own right. Instead, the project has
been designed specifically to experiment with features that could
potentially be borrowed and used in other designs – such as its
hover capabilities and ability to land on unstable terrain.

Perhaps just as important is the fact that Morpheus runs on a new
propulsion system using liquid oxygen and methane as fuel.
Crucially, these two components have been labeled as “green”
fuels that can be manufactured on other planets.

Last week’s successful flight also followed a botched attempt to
test Morpheus in 2012, when it experienced a “hardware
component failure” and crashed soon after takeoff.

Of course, Morpheus’s vertical landing ability is also being
reproduced in other spacecraft – notably the “Grasshopper” rocket
designed by SpaceX. Founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the company
successfully launched and landed a reusable Grasshopper prototype
in October 2013.

As for NASA, the Morpheus test comes as the agency has requested
more money from Congress to fund its space exploration efforts in
the fiscal 2015 budget. As RT reported in the past, NASA is hard
at work on efforts to capture and land an astronaut on an
asteroid, and it has also been testing new spacesuits that allow
for increased mobility. Other projects include extending the life
of the International Space Station and exploring a possible
mission to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons believed to contain
more water than there is in all of the Earth’s oceans.

Still, the budget request does include some space-related cuts,
including a $300 million decrease in the Exploration Systems
Development category. As noted by Slate, this department is in
charge of designing the next-generation Space Launch System
rocket, which was criticized as unnecessary in January by former
NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver.